Forward Thinking

According to the tachyon trajectory of this message, you should receive it around thirty years ago. (E-mail-less as you were, I’m not sure how it will appear. Muttered through radio static? A string of 8s, 0s, 3s, 4s, 7s, and 5s on your pocket calculator, to be read upside-down?) You’ll probably ignore it as blather. Perhaps, though, you’ll stash it and come back to it when it’s of some use.

How did you get into this stuff?

You’re going to be asked this question a lot. Sometimes with a sneer, sometimes with friendly curiosity, generally with bewilderment. It’s impossible to answer, of course; you didn’t get into anything. You’re inextricable from your likes, and since the birth of your consciousness what you’ve wanted are monsters, witches, aliens, spaceships. “How did you get into this?” is to say, “How come you are you?”

Of course, the stories that got you all to hush, in kindergarten, were the ones that contained exactly those elements which you still seek out. In that class full of six-year-olds, everyone was into dinosaurs and/or magic and/or Saturday-morning monsters, just like you. By your teens, though, you are indeed in the minority. Sure, some readers, especially after the hip discover Dick, Butler, Gibson, will come to the field later. But they’re rarities. Mostly those “into this” are those who simply never leave. So you can answer your interlocutors’ question with another: How did they get out of it?

Whether your fidelity to the fantastic represents rigor, arrested development, or both is moot. Here are a few key beats that’ll score your life.

Page 40 of “The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher,” by Beatrix Potter:

Your dapper batrachian hero sits on his lily pad. He doesn’t see that beneath him a trout is rising. Its mouth is open, heading for Mr. Fisher’s dangling right leg. The submerged, predatory yellow eye rolls. You always have to take deep breaths before turning to this page. This is where you learn the vertigo of knowing something a protagonist doesn’t. For you, the tradition of the glimpsed numinous starts here. Later, there’ll be Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. For now, there are monsters underneath—the Devil, Quatermass’s pit, Lovecraft’s burrowing Dholes, “Jaws.” All of which, magnificent as they are, are only ever echoes of Mr. Fisher’s trout.

Chapter 13 of “Golem100,” by Alfred Bester:

Bester is most celebrated for “The Stars My Destination,” but this later book is the first of his that you’ll read—far too young. It’s an extraordinary, troublesome, sometimes sadistic work that will shock you with its grotesquerie and sexual violence, but also, with a less uneasy tremor, with its disrespect for text. Several early pages are taken up by a musical score, but Chapter 13 is the revelation. It is structured by Jack Gaughan’s full-page illustrations, around and through which words must find their way. The images are the engine, organizing what language there is, invoking awe and, on the last page, an irruption of sudden textless terror. This is how you’ll discover modernism and its typographical games—not through concrete poetry but in this nastily visionary S.F. dystopia.

“The Faraway Tree” series, by Enid Blyton:

You’ll come to realize why Blyton is a controversial figure (for entirely understandable reasons, such as her use of racist terms and figures like the golliwog), but what strikes you at this first reading is the disparity between her tone of comfortable and sedate fabulism and the shocking alterity she depicts. No matter how rumpty-tum her diction, nothing can domesticate the freakish Land of Topsy-Turvy, dilute the glacial awe of the Land of Ice and Snow, or still the fear invoked by the fucking Land of Smack—an entire world whose quiddity is pain. The weirdness of these settings makes Blyton indelibly part of the speculative-fiction tradition, and it’s through them that you’ll first start to realize that writers aren’t in full control of their creations.

To these add the D. & D. “Monster Manual,” the magazine Interzone, the works of Thomas Disch and Josephine Saxton and J. G. Ballard and M. John Harrison and Tanith Lee and and and.

Yes, sometimes you’ll face the literary prejudice about which you’ve already started (justly) complaining. You can be insular, too, in truth—it wouldn’t kill you to start reading and appreciating some non-S.F. There can be a philistinism within this field that is philistinely denounced as infra dig. But the hankering for anything that gets you in the sweet spot of the strange can act as a conduit into other traditions. Which is why, perhaps counterintuitively, from your happy home in genre, you might make your way to Ionesco, to Charlotte Brontë, Amos Tutuola, Leonora Carrington, Alasdair Grey—because you’ll find in them, as you do in spaceship battles, something un-, ab-, ir-real that catches the breath.

You’ll read “Orlando,” because you heard it has a sex-changing time-traveller in it. Your English teacher will tell you witheringly that, for that reason, it’s very minor Woolf. Give it a few years. The movie will come out, and his opinion will look foolish and rote. You know and I know that your minor vanguardism wasn’t planned, but there’s no harm in being pleased by this unlikely Weltgeist, this Cunning of Geekdom. ♦